David Walsh Blog

• By David WalshMarch 27, 2023

  How to Block a Range of IP Addresses

  As much as content creators want traffic to their website, there is such thing as the wrong type of traffic. Sometimes it's content scrapers, sometimes it's malicious bots; either way, it's important to know how to block problematic IPs from your site.To block a range...

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• By David WalshMarch 6, 2023

  Detect the Content Type in the Clipboard

  A user's clipboard is a "catch all" between the operating system and the apps employed on it. When you use a web browser, you can highlight text or right-click an image and select "Copy Image". That made me think about how developers can detect what is...

• By David WalshFebruary 20, 2023

  CSS ::file-selector-button

  We all love beautifully styled form controls but, due to the differences between operating system displays, styling them can be painful. Due to that pain, we've created scores of libraries to mock these controls. Unfortunately that sometimes comes at the cost of accessibility, performance...

• By David WalshFebruary 6, 2023

  How to Open a Tor Brave Window from Command Line

  I love the Brave web browser for many reasons: ad blocking, Brave rewards, crypto integration, and even a Tor tab feature. I'll often use the Tor feature but wanted to know how I could automated opening Tor windows from command line.To open a Brave Tor...

• By David WalshJanuary 31, 2023

  How to Open an App from Anywhere on Mac Command Line

  Many engineers like myself live in the command line, and perform actions from command line that most others would click an icon for. I've always found opening apps from command line on Macs painful. You need to references the Applications directory, add .app to...

• By David WalshJanuary 30, 2023

  How to Create a Diff of Two Images

  When I was a child, I loved looking for Waldo in the "Where's Waldo?" book series. These days I'm a sucker for TMZ's "What's the Big Frigin Difference" images, where TMZ slightly changes an image and you have to spot the differences between the two.

• By David WalshJanuary 17, 2023

  5 Web Design Trends for 2023 That You Should Pay Attention To

  The start of a new year is usually a time when we start looking for ways to make something a little better. That something could be our life, work, or what we produce. Web designers, for example, might look for ways to make their designs more...

• By David WalshJanuary 16, 2023

  fetch with Timeout

  A few years back I wrote a blog post about how write a fetch Promise that times out. The function was effective but the code wasn't great, mostly because AbortController , which allows you to cancel a fetch Promise, did not yet exist. With...

• By David WalshJanuary 9, 2023

  Customizing HTML Form Validation

  Form validation has always been my least favorite part of web development. You need to duplicate validation on both client and server sides, handle loads of events, and worry about form element styling. To aid form validation, the HTML spec added some new form attributes...

• By David WalshJanuary 3, 2023

  How to Determine a JavaScript Promise’s Status

  Promises have changed the landscape of JavaScript. Many old APIs have been reincarnated to use Promises (XHR to fetch, Battery API), while new APIs trend toward Promises. Developers can use async/await to handle promises, or then/catch/finally with callbacks, but what Promises don't tell...